How many domains do you have pointing at your forum?

[Shawn Gossman]

How many domain names are pointing at your forum?

Why are you pointing more than one domain names at your forum?

 

[AWS]

Just 1. If you point more than 1 you get penalized for duplicate content.

 

[Tracy]

Just 1. If you point more than 1 you get penalized for duplicate content.

Depends on how you are serving it. If you are doing a 301 redirect it should not show as duplicate content since you are telling all inbound traffic to go to the authoritative/canonical domain. If a search engine is ignoring that, then that is on the search engine and not the site.
Now, if you have the site answering on multiple domains as what is "called" or using a 302 redirect... then yes, duplicate content can be an issue.
I have seen several times that people have the .COM TLD answering, then you use the .ORG/.NET TLD and it takes you to the same site, but maintains the .NET/.ORG TLD in the address bar. But honestly.. is it any different than really having your site answer on both WWW and non-WWW visits instead of redirecting to one or the other? It just happens that most engines deal with that directly now.
There are a wealth of sites that redirect the .ORG/.NET/.WHATEVER to a main .COM domain to keep folks from poaching as much as possible on the most common TLD's.



Now, the question becomes do you really want to redirect other domains to yours?
If you have/buy a domain dealing with race cars, do you necessarily want to redirect it to one that deals with restoring antique cars? You can also have the issue of bad "juice" or poor reputation for the other domain. If it is one that has been known to have trash content, do you want it redirected to your current domain? Or do you want to just have it redirect certain inbound links to another site?

 

[frm]

How many domain names are pointing at your forum?

I've had several (25+, maybe 50 as I did a "select all" edit) that had high traffic pointing to my (first/older) forum at one point, taking them out of parking to do so.

Why are you pointing more than one domain names at your forum?

For example, there might be been 25 domains and they were receiving 150 visits per month on average. That is a 3000 per month surge in traffic. If each domain costs $10/year to renew, you could calculate it out as being ($25 * 10) / (3000 * 12) = $0.007 CPC (cost per click) that you would have to pay with traditional advertising, something unattainable at any bid to get a click.

The problem is, that it's untargeted traffic. Thus, a 0% conversion rate on the traffic.

On top of that, the traffic that I was getting was from the domains that were landing on parked pages that did serve targeted advertising. So, while I was paying $0.007 per click, I was losing out on potential clicks of $0.10~ from that lost traffic.

I've since stopped the practice because it was a net loss, and will attempt targeted traffic next to see if paying $0.10 CPC has better results.

One thing to note is that when you lose that targeted traffic on a parked page for so long, it takes quite a bit for the parked page to serve up those targeted ads again... it appears that the parking provider forgets the saved keywords or ads it was previously serving, therefore, it takes time to build back up to get $0.10(~$2) clicks from the traffic again.